Chapter 647 — The Old Man of Grey Ridge

CHAPTER 647

The Old Man of Grey Ridge

It came down the terraces on its knuckles, dragging a pine trunk stripped of branches.

It was an ape, twelve feet tall, its grey fur gone white across the shoulders. Its small eyes went from the dead wolves to the dead boar beyond the river, and then to Shi Feng.

It was counting.

“The Old Man of Grey Ridge,” Old Farmer Mao whispered. “My grandfather saw it come down once. It took half the slope.”

On the wall, Gao Rukui’s Spirit Sense touched the beast and recoiled.

“Deity Transformation!” Gao Rukui shouted, and his voice cracked. “Feng Shi! It’s early Deity Transformation! Get back across the river!”

Boots rang on the wall stair. Twenty men in black lacquer armour came up behind the captain, led by an officer with a stamped warrant.

“Officer Ding Huai, household guard of the City Lord,” the officer announced. “By the City Lord’s order, the north gate stays shut until the sect halls return. No one goes out.”

“Nobody’s going out,” Gao Rukui said grimly, pointing over the parapet. “He’s already out. The alchemist from Lamp-Oil Lane, earning his fee.”

On the slope, Shi Feng looked up at the ape and felt his scalp tighten.

A whole realm above him, he thought. Men like that, he’d fought before. But this one had sent its noise to the south gate and waited for the boar to open the north. A beast that could think was worse than one that was strong.

“Uncle, take everyone behind the Zhuo shed,” Shi Feng said. “Stay low.”

The ape opened its mouth.

The roar hit the terraces like a falling wall. The Zhuo drying house lost every tile, and the farmers were thrown flat. The force drove Shi Feng back a full terrace, and his heels cut two furrows in the frozen mud. Blood ran from his nose. The golden bones held him upright, and nothing else would have.

“It’s only a roar!” someone screamed on the wall. “It’s only a roar, and the shed’s lost its roof!”

The ape came on with the pine trunk.

It swung the trunk low. Shi Feng went up and over it on Drifting Ash Step, and the trunk smashed a terrace edge to gravel behind him. He cut at the ape’s wrist on the way down. The red arc of the Sunset-Splitting Sword met the trunk instead, split it lengthwise and set both halves smoking.

The ape dropped the burning wood and threw its other fist.

There was no room to step. Shi Feng put the flat of the grey Sword in front of his chest, set his left hand behind the blade, and took it.

Boom!

He flew twenty paces, over two terraces, and landed on the river ice. The ice cracked under him. Both his arms were numb to the shoulder.

“He’s down!”

“He blocked a Deity Transformation fist head-on!”

“…”

Shi Feng got up, spat blood and watched the ape.

It had followed him down to the bank and stopped. It paced the snow at the edge of the ice and didn’t step onto it. Its fur stood up along its back.

It had come across by the bridge, Shi Feng thought. A mountain ape. It didn’t like water.

He smiled and stepped backward off the ice onto the current.

The ape tore a boulder out of the bank and threw it, then another. He let the current carry him downstream, and the boulders burst on the water where he’d been. The ape ran along the bank after him, angrier with every step.

At the fourth boulder, it lost patience and stepped onto the ice shelf.

Shi Feng let the current turn him in toward its left side. The Sunset-Splitting arc went across the back of its knee. The Thousand Forge heat ran into the cut, and the fur along its leg caught fire.

The ape’s knee buckled. Twelve feet of beast came down on the ice shelf, and the ice shelf broke.

It went into the Lesser Wan up to its chest, thrashing and screaming. Its huge right hand shot out and closed around Shi Feng’s body and lifted him off the water.

The grip tightened, and two of his ribs cracked.

“It’s got him!” Gao Rukui roared.

Shi Feng laid his left palm on the ape’s wrist.

The All-Devouring Physique bit down. It took a palm’s worth of the ape’s qi straight out of its arm, wild and heavy. The ape’s fingers went slack. Shi Feng didn’t try to hold that qi. He sent it straight down his sword arm with the Thousand Forge Flame Art behind it, and the grey Sword went from red to almost white.

The ape lifted him toward its open jaws, to bite what it couldn’t crush.

Shi Feng went with it. At the top of the lift, he was above the ape’s head, and the Sunset-Splitting Sword came down.

It was still a narrow red stroke, not yet anything more. It went in through the ape’s brow and split the skull to the jaw.

The Old Man of Grey Ridge sank into the Lesser Wan without another sound.

Shi Feng dropped into the river after it, caught the current with his heels on the second try and stood, swaying. He hauled the ape’s head up by the fur. The core inside the skull had been split in two by his stroke, and its qi was already bleeding out as steam over the black water.

“I wanted that in one piece,” Shi Feng said. “It didn’t agree.”

The farmers came out from behind the Zhuo shed.

“The Old Man is dead!”

“In the river! He killed it standing in the river!”

On the wall, Gao Rukui swept the young man with his Spirit Sense twice, as if he didn’t trust it.

“Mid Soul Formation,” Gao Rukui said hoarsely. “He’s mid Soul Formation, and he killed a Deity Transformation king!”

Officer Ding Huai opened a small book and wrote in it.

On the roof of the Zhuo drying house, Zhuo Heng lowered his sword.

“…”

Shi Feng waded ashore holding his ribs and sat on a stone. On the slope, the beasts that had lain flat slunk back toward the hills. The eastern sky was turning grey.

“Young man,” Old Farmer Mao said shakily. “What do we owe you?”

“Count the frost-lilies, uncle,” Shi Feng said. “Whatever’s still in the ground, I’m billing the Pavilion for.”

Across the river, the Iron-Back Boar still lay across the gate road. Its core was still in its skull.